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Asked by mcleani to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 21 Jun 2013.
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Robert Woolfson answered on 21 Jun 2013:
When the sun dies it grows to a super-star called a red giant. This will basically melt the Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars. The rest of the planets will also be heavily affected as the sun will become lighter as it loses gas, making it’s gravity weaker.
Basically, the solar system is not going to have a good time when the sun dies.
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Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:
It would swallow up Mercury and Venus, for starters – when the Sun gets old it’ll expand in size. It’ll probably reach Earth, which might be pulled into the sun and evaporated, but Mars will probably be fine. Once the Sun dies, they’ll be blasted with half the mass of the Sun being blown out as a wind – the rest of the Sun will be a small, dense clump of protons and electrons called a white dwarf about half its current mass. This will mean that the planets, if they survive being blasted by the solar wind, will probably lose their atmospheres if they have any. It will also change their orbits, because the orbital speed depends on the mass of the thing you’re orbiting and the distance to the thing – so the planets will move outwards. The Moon may also be dragged towards Earth, causing it to break up and form a ring around the sun-blasted planet.
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Matthew Pankhurst answered on 22 Jun 2013:
You could say that the earth will be more affected because it would change so much – all the life would be stripped away and the surface water vapourised. Compare that to mercury or venus and those surfaces would look relatively similar. However – their ultimate fate would be the same – becoming second hand solar system material waiting for the next cosmic cycle 🙂 The matter that makes our solar system has done all this before – it’s true the matter that we are made of has been inside giant stars before!
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